Читать книгу Institution Building in Weak States - Andrew Radin - Страница 15

One challenge of studying foreign intervention is evaluating success. Works in the literature use such criteria as the maintenance of peace, the creation of basic democratic governance, the achievement of conditions believed to sustain peace after an intervener departs, and the development of a legitimate state.⁴² Evaluating of these criteria is often difficult or controversial, which is one reason I analyze particular state institutions rather than studying intervention at the level of the society. In brief, this book assesses relative success by judging how an institution’s effectiveness, accountability, and compliance with the law improved over time.

Western countries and international organizations who pursue reform seek to make state institutions in partner countries reflect the desirable qualities of state institutions in Western, developed countries.⁴³ Building from Fukuyama’s work on political development, I identify three separable, desired qualities of state institutions: (1) effectiveness, meaning that state institutions can make and enforce rules as well as provide services;⁴⁴ (2) accountability, meaning that state institutions are overseen by an elected government and are responsive to the society as a whole, including minorities;⁴⁵ and (3) the rule of law, meaning that written laws exist and state institutions comply with them. These three dimensions do not always go together.⁴⁶ State institutions may be effective but not accountable, such as in the case of a repressive police force, or may be legally compliant without being effective, as in the case of a well-governed but ill-equipped military. Given the problems that unaccountable or ineffective state institutions may pose for a society’s future development, progress on all three dimensions is desirable and indicative of success.

Various works use slightly different concepts or terms to describe the desired qualities of state institutions. For example, some highlight the creation of impersonal and rational-bureaucratic “Weberian” institutions, referring to the German sociologist Max Weber.⁴⁷ Others observe a “liberal” model for intervention, defined as making state institutions in other countries more similar to those in Western countries.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, across US and international intervention and institution building, as the case studies below indicate, there is general consensus and little disagreement about these overarching objectives.⁴⁹

The United States and its partners have at times accepted or supported state institutions that do not reflect these desired qualities based on particular political or security objectives, as in the case of US cooperation with autocratic regimes during the Cold War.⁵⁰ Frustration can develop when Western organizations help to build institutions that are not accountable or compliant with the law. This frustration may develop both from a normative perspective and an instrumental one since many interveners believe that state institutions are more effective and sustainable if they are accountable and legally compliant. This book does argue against attempting to replicate Western institutional forms without taking local politics into account. It simultaneously affirms the overarching goal of making state institutions in partner countries achieve the desirable qualities of Western state institutions and rejects reform to build repressive or unaccountable institutions. Indeed, this book’s metric for success implies that such reforms would be counterproductive. As detailed in the conclusion, the book claims that it is possible to select demands and recommendations that improve multiple facets of a state institution without provoking domestic opposition.

While the ultimate goal of foreign-supported reform may be to enable partner state institutions to achieve similar standards as institutions in highly developed Western countries, this is not a realistic goal for judging reform efforts. Instead, I use the state institutions in neighboring countries as a point of comparison. For example, it is more reasonable to compare state institutions in Kosovo with those in Serbia, Albania, or Macedonia rather than Germany or France.⁵¹ Regional standards of governance offer a real and achievable goal for postwar societies and one that citizens in these societies recognize. The case studies include regional comparisons, especially at the beginning and end of the analysis to provide a benchmark for the quality of the state institution, and the appendix elaborates on the choices of regional comparisons.

There are several available statistics tracking the quality of governance in different countries, but they all have problems that make it infeasible to use them to evaluate success and failure based on my criteria. One fundamental problem is that existing statistics study overall changes in the quality of governance in a society rather than measuring changes in particular state institutions. Existing databases also do not provide consistent cross-national measures of the different effectiveness, accountability, and rule of law of the military and police. While existing measures might be useful as an indicator of the quality of central government, they are insufficiently sensitive to identify the changes that occur during a foreign reform effort. For example, the World Bank Governance Indicators for Iraq barely changed from 2003 to 2011, despite significant changes in the country’s institutions: on a −2.5 to 2.5 scale, government effectiveness varied from −1.70 to −1.57; voice and accountability from −1.5 to −1.07; and the rule of law from −1.64 to −1.45.⁵² One possible reason for the small variation in the World Bank statistics is that they are designed to be globally comparable. Making the index more sensitive to reforms in a particular country could make it harder to compare Iraq with other countries with more stable institutions, such as Saudi Arabia or Italy. Other databases that might speak to the quality of central government, such as Polity, do not include measurements of the relevant cases, because the international presence created an interruption in government.⁵³ Analysts have also questioned the conceptual consistency of these datasets.⁵⁴

Because of these challenges, I propose a new scoring system for the quality of a state institution. The score system evaluates each of the three desired dimensions listed above—effectiveness, accountability, and compliance with the law—from 0 to 3, with 0 corresponding to the absence or complete dysfunction with respect to that dimension; 1 meaning that the institution has some basic framework or structure but little else with respect to that dimension; 2 meaning that the institution has some desired characteristics but does not meet regional standards for that dimension; and 3 corresponding to an institution that operates at or above the level of comparable institutions in neighboring countries with respect to that dimension. The appendix provides specific questions that the case studies use to make these assessments. By adding the results of the scores for the three dimensions, the scoring system yields an overall score for the quality of an institution ranging from 0 to 9.

The case studies repeatedly apply this scoring system over the course of the reform effort to evaluate the quality of an institution over time and thereby judge the success of reform following a rubric shown in table 1.1. The case studies seek to be as transparent as possible in making this assessment, although the result is inevitably subjective and some improvement or decline in quality may not alter the score. This scoring system offers a useful, if not always precise, metric for evaluating competing theories and for comparing the relative improvement of state institutions across different countries and regions.

TABLE 1.1. Change in Score and Associated Level of Success

Change in 0–9 score	Judgment of success	Description
0 or negative	Counterproductive	Violence or major nonviolent protest occurred, or the state institution was worse off than when the stage of reform began.
0	None/Minimal	There may be identifiable improvements in rules, practices, or organization, but an outside observer would likely not notice the difference between the quality of the state institution before and after.
0–1	Limited	There were some changes in the rules or functioning of the state institution, which might have lasting effect, but the general quality of the state institution remained similar.
2–3	Moderate	There were clear improvements to the state institution.
4–9	High	The state institution experienced rapid and dramatic improvement.